Jews and Christians United for Israel® (JACUFI)

Yoram Hazony in The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture said that the Hebrew Bible (or the “Christian Old Testament”) represents the product of reason, while known by way of revelation.[1]  Western civilization has embraced Greek philosophy and ignored the more ancient Jewish philosophy.  Philosophers of 19^th Century Enlightenment portrayed the Bible as a work of superstition and irrationality.  German Enlightenment introduced into the history of reason contempt for revelation.  Along with this contempt for Biblical teachings, European Enlightenment injected anti-Semitism into Western philosophy, denying the value of anything from Jewish philosophy and the Hebrew Scriptures.

However, the Hebrew Scriptures are a study in the works of reason for man given by God. The Hebrew Scriptures are for man’s nature and directed toward his well-being and establish political, moral and metaphysical truths for man.Since God’s promises are eternal, the effectiveness of the Hebrew Scriptures in bringing life and well-being to man are unfailing.

Listen to Me, you who know righteousness, the nation with My Torah [the Word of God] in its heart: Do not fear from the disparagement of man, and do not be broken by their insults; for like a garment, a moth will eat them, and like wool, a worm will eat them, but My righteousness will be forever, and My salvation for all generations. Isaiah 51:7-8.

The Torah was given in the wilderness after the Exodus from Egypt and on land belonging to no one nation.  Thus, the Scriptures were a gift given to all of mankind and for all to accept or reject.

Come, let us go up to the Mountain of the Lord, to the Temple of the God of Jacob, and He will teach us of His ways and we will walk in His paths. For from Zion will the Torah come forth, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem . . . Come, let us walk by the light of the Lord! Isaiah 2:3, 5.

In Milton Mayer’s book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45, he summed up the conduct of nations by saying “[n]ations are made not of oak and rock but of men, and, as the men are, so will the nations be.”[1]  Nazism in Germany became “a mass movement and not the tyranny of a diabolical few over helpless millions.”[2]  William Shirer, considering how a great country could lose its soul and conscience, remarked in “This is Berlin:” Radio Broadcasts from Nazi Germany “how thin and brittle the veneer of civilization can be.”[3]  What happened to these so-called Christian nations?  What were the foundations of their Christian faith?  Were they built on solid rock or shifting sand?  Were they built on the Word of God or the religions created by man?

These prophets prophesy falsehood in My Name! I did not send them nor command them nor speak to them. A false vision, divination, emptiness, and the deception of their heart are they prophesying to you. Jeremiah 14:14.

         What happened to the post-Holocaust Christian commitment in the 1950s to protect Jews when others seek their destruction?  The destruction of European Jewry awoke the collective Christian conscience shortly after the war.  However, after the miracle of the Six-Day War in 1967, the world was incensed that the Jews refused to be slaughtered again, the sacrificial lamb refused to lie down.  Since the creation of the State of Israel has overturned many Jewish stereotypes from the past 2,000 years, the “Jewish question” is now disguised as anti-Israel and anti-Zionism.  Even after Auschwitz and the murder of 6 million Jews, Christian anti-Semitism with the mainline churches still exists with its replacement theology.

In Genesis 25:23, Jacob and Esau become two separate nations of conflicting ideologies, a nation of faith and a nation of power.  Esau comes to represent Edom, which is identified with Rome and ultimately with the formal Christian establishment itself, which hates Judaism.  The Christian world was silent in 1939, when Hitler announced and began his plans for the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe, when the British issued its White Paper forbidding land sales to Jews and closing Jewish immigration in the British Mandate Palestine and when the U.S. government sent the S.S. St. Louis with Jews fleeing Nazi Germany of which half of the 937 refugees were women and children back to the death camps of Europe.

Today, Christian leaders of the Presbyterian, Methodist and Lutheran churches campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctioning of Israel and betray the Jewish people’s right to defend themselves against the threats of Palestinian terrorists who seek Jewish extermination.  Protestant-founded universities deny Jewish professionals from participating in university sponsored educational seminars, while fawning over Muslim terrorists.  The Nazis also began with boycotts of Jewish businesses and professionals and lending support to Muslim terrorists such as the Grand Mufti el-Husseini, Hitler’s disciple who incited murder against the Jews in the British Mandate Palestine and throughout the Muslim world.

The mainline Christian churches lost their moral authority long ago by their apathy and indifference to Jewish suffering and their moral decline is reflected in their dwindling members.  For these churches, the Holy Bible is read through the prism of church dogma and cannons.

Although a true Christian cannot be anti-Semitic, consciously or subconsciously anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in Christian church dogma and cannons.  However, is there something to understand hidden behind the dogma and cannons.  There are significant spiritual movements within Christianity today that draw closer to the Bible and recognize that the true Christian roots are Jewish.  The Synagogue has been called the “mother of the Christian church,” a place of prayer and of gathering to study the Holy Scriptures.[4]  Jesus never ceased teaching in the Synagogue.  The destruction of the Second Temple was a religious message to both Jews and Gentiles of a covenantal change to an internalized relationship with a more hidden God.

After God’s redeeming event of the Exodus, the Jewish people are the carriers of the message of redemption to the world by their very existence.  After the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and the Roman wars, Judaism moved from the Biblical era of God’s active intervention in history to the rabbinical era of God’s concealed involvement and the Covent of Abraham became an internalized and voluntary covenant.

The Holocaust and the rebirth of the State of Israel marked contradictory yet intensely connected events of destruction and redemption.  The term “Holocaust” means “burnt offering” or “sacrifice to God.”  The Holocaust opened up full human responsibility for the outcome of the covenant of redemption.

He will call upon Me and I will answer him, I am with him in distress; I will release him and I will bring him honor. With long life will I satisfy him, and I will show him My salvation. Psalms 91:15-16.

          I am with him in distress means that where Israel suffers, God is present suffering with God’s people.  Where was God at Auschwitz? God was there starving, beaten, gassed and burned alive, sharing the agony.

          The State of Israel is the message to the world of redemption with God’s eternal presence with the Jewish people as His witnesses in history.  The building of a Jewish society in Israel testifies to the existence of God.  We forget that God is known to the world through the Jewish people.  A Jew by affirming Jewish identity affirms God’s existence and Judaism means bearing witness to God.  Since God is hidden, Jewish people have to show the presence of God by testifying to the world of God’s existence.  Supporting the State of Israel and the return of Jewish religious life is a religious act.

This message of redemption carries forth into the Christian teaching of salvation for the world.  We are living now through a new revelational event as prophesied in Jeremiah, in which God shall be considered the God of the Return rather than as the God of the Exodus.

Therefore, behold, days are coming – the word of the Lord – when people will no longer swear, ‘As the Lord lives, Who brought the Children of Israel up from the land of Egypt,” but rather, “As the Lord lives, Who brought up and brought back the offspring of the House of Israel from the land of the North and from all the lands wherein He had dispersed them”; and they will dwell in their [own] land. Jeremiah 23:7-8.

 Copyright (c) 2013 by Martin M. van Brauman

          Israeli independence has altered the condition of the world’s oldest people. The achievement of the nation-state of Israel has allowed a re-flourishing of Jewish culture, memory and language.  The formation of the State of Israel has changed the existential condition of Diaspora Jews, even in the United States.[1]  Without the State of Israel, the self-confidence and sense of belonging that American Jews now take for granted today would disappear.  Without the establishment of the Jewish State, the Jewish peoplehood and Judaism might not have survived from the Holocaust, the place of serpents and shrouded . . .  in the shadow of death.  However, how do we explain this rebirth of the Commonwealth of Israel after 2,000 years of exile, persecution and extermination directed against the Jewish people?

            The Biblical mission of Israel, as described in Exodus 19:6, is . . . to Me a kingdom of ministers and a holy nation.  A kingdom of ministers and a holy nation is a God-centered republic, in which all are priests and servants and God alone rules.[2]  It is not a society, in which a priestly caste rules over a non-priestly people.  The law of a kingdom of ministers is the will of God.[3]

            It was not Israel that was chosen at Mount Sinai, but rather Israel that came into being by having been chosen.[4]  Israel was called into being by the will of God through the direct encounters with the Divine Presence.[5]  God’s choice made Israel as a witness to His Divine Presence in history. 

            The collective Jewish people could have surrendered its destiny as the people of God to its enemies and avoided the centuries of exile, hatred and destruction, but they are a “stiff-neck people” and that is why God chose them to be His witnesses on earth. 

All this came upon us yet we have not forgotten You, and we have not been false to Your covenant.  Our heart has not turned back, nor have our footsteps strayed from Your path, even when You crushed us in the place of serpents and shrouded us in the shadow of death.  Have we forgotten the Name of our God and extended our hands to a strange god?  Is it not so that God can examine this, for He knows the secrets of the heart?  Because for Your sake we are killed all the time, we are considered as sheep for slaughter. Psalms 44:18-23.

            Although Divine Presence may be hidden from man today, indirect intervention in the affairs of men, who are free to recognize or to reject His intervention, is how God performs His Will.[6]  Indirect divine intervention can be as a result of human action, performed by free will, or of the interplay of natural forces, or a combination of both.[7]

            Without the choice of good or evil, man would lack the free will of action given by God.  If Divine providence occurred in the world convincingly to man, there would be not free will and a morally responsible human to choose good or evil when evil is always punished in this world immediately by God.[8]  When Divine Presence occurs in history, such as the miracle of the re-establishment of the State of Israel after 2,000 years and the Jewish survival during the 1948 War on Independence, the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War when another Holocaust should have happened each time, history stands still in the miracle for the history of the events cannot be explained by man’s rational.

            The rebirth and survival of the State of Israel is the assurance of the messianic fulfillment of history.  The survival of the Jewish people and of Judaism in spite of 2,000 years of persecutions and exterminations is the mystery of all ages.  Dr. Eliezer Berkovits stated in God, Man and History: A Jewish Interpretation that “Israel’s suffering is the measure of man’s failure to become a ‘partner’ with God in the task of human salvation.”[9]  Israel’s survival is by itself the proof that God’s purpose in history will not be defeated and the day of redemption and salvation is coming.  Today, we are witnessing the ingathering of all of the tribes of Israel.

Fear not, for I am with you; from the East I will bring your offspring and from the West I will gather you.  I will say to the North, “Give [them] over!” and to the South, “Do not withhold! Bring My sons from afar and My daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by My Name and whom I have created for My glory, whom I have fashioned, even perfected; to liberate the people who are blind though they have eyes, and deaf though they have ears.” Isaiah 43:5-8. [Emphasis added]. 

As in Isaiah 43:8, will the ingathering of the Jewish people back to the Land open the eyes and ears of the Christian community to see and hear God’s witnesses on earth?  The world is witnessing the awaking of the assimilated Jews around the world to their ancient heritage and the ingathering to the Land.

Behold I will raise My hand toward nations, and I will hoist my banner towards peoples, and they will bring your children in [their] arms, and your daughters will be carried on [their] shoulder . . . Then you will know that I am the Lord, and those Who put their hopes in Me shall not be ashamed. Isaiah 49: 22-23.

            Throughout the world, people are attempting to discover their Jewish ancestry and seeking possible return to Israel after centuries of being “lost.”  Michael Freund founded Shavei Israel [www.shavei.org] as the only Jewish organization actively seeking the “lost Jews” to assist with their return to the Land, according to Biblical prophecies.  Shavei Israel provides guidance and understanding in finding Jewish roots and assistance in making a return.  Shavei Israel assists all who have decided that Judaism and a return to the Jewish people are central to their identity.

Copyright © 2012 by Martin M. van Brauman 

Recently, the leaders of the Lutheran, Presbyterian and Methodist churches and the National Council of Churches sent an appeal to Congress to end military aid to Israel. Consider the death and destruction of innocent men, women and children in Israel that could have occurred from the 1,500 plus rockets fired between November 14th and 21st by Hamas without the US funding of the Iron Dome defense shield. There would have been no Operation Pillar of Defense for Israel to protect the Jewish people.

The mainline churches continue the same anti-Semitic obsessions from 2,000 years of demonizing, persecuting and murdering Jews. These churches all share the belief in the displacement of the “Old Testament” by the “New” and the permanent exile of God’s people. They support the Arab propaganda without question. Yet, they are blind to Christian persecution in Gaza, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and the PLO controlled areas in the, so-named by Jordan, “West Bank” and all Muslim countries that deny freedom of religion to all other religions.

This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines. Matthew 15:8-9. 

Eliezer Berkovits stated in Faith after the Holocaust that “[t]here is no other witness that God is present in history but the history of the Jewish people.”¹ Great empires do not testify to divine presence in history for they can be explained as a worldly power in the context of power history.² Only a small ancient people, whose very existence is forever attacked by the forces of power history and yet survives and has an impact on world history out of proportion to its size and material power, testifies to God’s “powerless” guidance in history.³

A people, who exist not by its power but only by its commitment as God’s witnesses, provide by its very survival the testimony to God’s Presence in the world.⁴ Without God in the world, the existence of the Jews surpasses all human explanation.

Not because you are more numerous than all the peoples did the Lord desire you and choose you, for you are the fewest of all the peoples. Rather, because of the Lord’s love for you and because He observes the oath that He swore to your forefathers did He take you out with a strong hand and redeem you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. You must know that the Lord, your God – He is the God, the faithful God, Who safeguards the covenant and the kindness for those who love Him and for those who observes His commandments, for a thousand generations. And He repays His enemies in his lifetime to make him perish; He shall not delay for His enemy – in his lifetime He shall repay him [the wicked may be rewarded in this world, but not in the World to Come]. Deuteronomy 7:7-10. 

You are My witnesses – the word of the Lord – and My servant whom I have chosen, so that you will know and believe in Me, and understand that I am He; before Me nothing was created by a god nor will there be after Me! Isaiah 43:10

Israel does not witness, nor was it chosen, because it knows, believes and understands.⁵ It has been made the witness and has been chosen, so that it may know, believe and understand by faith history, not by power history.⁶

During the Christian dark ages and Middle Ages, the mystery of the Jews’ survival was explained as the work of the devil.⁷ The Jews endured by His hidden and mysterious strength unrecognized in medieval Christian lands. Satan’s people of medieval Christianity was replaced by the secret international conspiracy of the Elders of Zion. Jewish survival cannot be explained in terms of power history.⁸ The “secret world government” of the Jews under the theories of the Elders of Zion is God’s guidance in history of His people.⁹ The Nazi extermination of a powerless Jew was a metaphysical fear of the true mystery of God’s “powerless” presence in history as “revealed” in the continual survival of the Jewish people.¹⁰ The Nazis represented a satanic rebellion to dethrone God.¹¹

The transformation of the State of Israel after each Arab invasion in 1948, 1967 and 1973 for existence can only be described as history on a metaphysical level. The redemption of mankind includes the redemption of the Jewish people in the Land of the Jews – the messianic significance of the Land.¹² Jewish history is part of the cosmic drama of redemption.¹³ Only messianic redemption can bring meaning and justification to Israel’s martyrdom.¹⁴

God is hidden to enable us to have free will to choose God or reject Him.¹⁵ Without free will, man would be only an android.¹⁶ Evil is the consequence of this human freedom.

“For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come . . .” Mark 7:21. 

The stereotype representation of the “Old Testament God of wrath” versus the “New Testament God of Love” brings forth the anti-Semitic position that the God of the Old Testament as not the one revealed by Jesus. Christians believe that Jews follow the commandments in the Torah to earn God’s love or a place in heaven and is a religion of “works righteousness” rather than of grace. However, the election of the collective Jewish people is based on grace, not merit or works. All Israel has a share in the world to come as it is part of the covenant. Divine love is already present; it is not earned.

There were two major theological events in Jewish history, the revelation at Sinai and revelation beginning with Auschwitz. Sinai was a revelation of God’s Presence by the giving of His Word to the Jewish peoplehood and the revelation beginning with the Holocaust and the re-birth of the State of Israel “. . . is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” Matthew 24:8; Mark 13:8.

Is the evangelical Christian community the means by which non-Jews can come to worship the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? Can evangelical Christian belief be seen from the Jewish perspective as producing a benefit of the great numbers of those outside the Jewish community now aware of the coming of the Jewish Messiah?

Copyright © 2012 by Martin M. van Brauman

1 Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust. New York: KTAV Publishing House, Inc. (1st ed. 1973), p. 114.

2 Ibid. 

3 Ibid., p. 115.

4 Ibid. 

5 Ibid. 

6 Ibid. 

7 Ibid., p. 116.

8 Ibid. 

9 Ibid. 

10 Ibid., p. 117.

11 Ibid. 

12 Ibid., p. 146.

13 Ibid., p. 152.

14 Ibid. 

15 Ibid., p. 117.

16 Ibid. 

During the British Mandate period of the Holy Land, Gush Etzion was a group of Jewish farming communities, located in the Judean Hills overlooking the road from Hebron, City of the Patriarchs, to Jerusalem, capital of the House of David. Abraham pitched his tent here when he entered the Land promised by God. David tended his flocks here and the Maccabees conducted a desperate uprising against the Hellenistic Syrian army.

The men and women of the farming villages in the Gush Etzion area with few weapons defended their homes against the brutal assault by the Arab Legion with modern armaments of artillery and armored vehicles and lead by British officers. The men and women of Gush Etzion defended the Hebron road against the Arab march into Jerusalem and allowed the Jewish communities in Jerusalem the time to protect the city. They were the first victims in the War of Independence. On May 13, 1948 in the final Arab assault, 130 men and 21 women defenders fell in the massacre at Kfar Etzion.¹

When the remaining Jewish defenders in Kfar Etzion surrendered to the Arab Legion and after an Arab photographer with his flowing kaffiyeh finished the group picture of the prisoners, the Arabs unleashed their machine guns² in the spirit of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen troops during the Holocaust. Then, an officer of the “courageous” Arab Legion threw a grenade into the shelter under the Monastery where the wounded laid in agony and anyone showing signs of life in the farmyard was shot and killed³ in the finest of SS tradition.

The defenders of Gush Etzion belong to that “ancient and unbroken lineage” of them who were “swifter than eagles and stronger than lions: pleasant were they in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.”⁴ United, the defenders proclaimed to the world that they fought for “the eternity of Jerusalem” [Netsah Yerushalayim].⁵ The Jewish communities have returned to Gush Etzion after its recapture following the Six-Day War. Your children shall return to their own land. Jeremiah 31:16. 

And the world cannot comprehend the eternal significance of the return of Jewish communities in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria for the Jewish soul and to the fulfillment of Scriptures.

Copyright © 2012 by Martin M. van Brauman

Memorial to the three periods of Jewish settlement in Gush Etzion in the 20th century.

Between 1948 and 1967, the Lone Oak was the only sign of the destroyed communities.

The Lone Oak symbolized the destroyed communities of Gush Etzion and the longing to return.

The community of Neve Daniel in the distance in the Gush Etzion area.

A small part of the city of Efrat.

Gush Etzion regional center – water tower and Neve Chana Girls High School.

¹ Knohl, Dov, Siege in the Hills of Hebron: The Battle of the Etzion Bloc, (1st ed., 5th printing 2006), p. 340.
²Ibid., p. 334.
³ Ibid., p. 335.
⁴ Ibid., p. 12.
⁵ Ibid., p. 257.

One cannot give a human answer to a Divine question. Free will is man’s greatest gift from God – to choose between good and life or evil and death. Free will does not remove Divine Providence from the world, although it may be concealed. Free will exists, but the march of history is not determined by the unpredictability of man’s free will.

The healthy soul has faith in God and His guidance of the world. The rationale for the existence of evil with respect to man’s history is beyond human understanding, other than God wanted to give man free will. When man pursues the enticement of the Serpent . . . and you will be like God . . . Genesis 3:5, man replaces God by becoming a god.

When bad things happen, the question should not be where was God, but where was man? The question raised by the evil of the Holocaust is not the issue of Divine justice but the issue of the meaning and significance of the Holocaust for man, who has rejected God. Where was man during the Holocaust? He was tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that leads to death.

. . of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, you must not eat thereof, for on the day you eat of it, you shall surely die. Genesis 2:17. 

Eighteen century Enlightenment philosophy gave birth to Liberalism and Humanism, while hastening the rejection of God. Man argues that the god of pure Science will eventually bring about mutual understanding among previously evil nations and men. As in man’s beginning sin of eating from the Tree of Knowledge, today’s man continues to dream the primal dream of . . and you will be like God, knowing good and bad. Genesis 3:5 and “Thou shall not kill” is obscured as God’s Word is rejected as obsolete.

And you may say in your heart, “My strength and the might of my hand made me all this wealth!” Deuteronomy 8:17 . . lest . . . your heart will become haughty and you will forget the Lord, your God. Deuteronomy 8:12-14. 

The god of Darwinism deprived man of his uniqueness in the order of God’s creation. According to today’s man, man was not a direct creation of God. Man did not emerge from the womb of nature, a final and completed product with a soul that elevates him above other creatures.1

Let not the wise man glorify himself with his wisdom, and let not the strong man glorify himself with his strength, let not the rich man glorify himself with his wealth. For only with this may one glorify himself – contemplating and knowing Me, for I am the Lord Who does kindness, justice and righteousness in the land, for in these is My desire – the word of the Lord. Jeremiah 9:22-23.

God’s ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts. Just as man cannot know His essence, so it is impossible to comprehend His ways. His ways are concealed from us. Ultimate knowledge for man is to know that one simply cannot know.

The individual freely chooses whether to act for good or evil. Divine Providence knows the actions of nations and its people, but the individual is still free to choose. Free will applied to the Egyptians during the Jewish captivity and to the Germans during the Holocaust on an individual basis, but Divine providence did not control the individual’s free will. For the Germans were not pawns of Divine Providence and had the choice to exceed their charge. The individual is free to augment . . . the evil. Zechariah 1:15. The Holocaust is a Divine question that we cannot answer, but the Jewish people continue to survive and yet the world cannot explain why in human rationale.

We live on, 

In a world in flames, 

We have nothing, 

Yet in the face of enemies 

Who seek to slander and destroy us, 

We live on, 

We are here! 

We live on, 

Through the worst of times, 

Through the darkest hours, 

We survive, we endure, 

We are here! 

We Live On, written in the Vilna Ghetto during the Holocaust. 

Today in Israel and in Jerusalem [o]ld men and old women . . . once again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with his staff in his hand because of advanced age; and the streets of the city . . . [are] . . . filled with boys and girls playing in its streets . . . Just as it . . . [is] . . . wondrous in the eyes of the remnant of his people in . . . [these] . . . days, so . . . [is] . . . it . . . wondrous in My eyes . . . Behold, I am saving My people from the land of the east and from the land where the sun sets; and I will bring them and they will dwell within Jerusalem. They will be a people unto Me, and I will be a God unto them, in truth and in righteousness. Zechariah 8:4-8.

1 Yoel Schwartz and Yitzchak Goldstein, Shoah: A Jewish perspective on tragedy in the context of the Holocaust, Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, Ltd. (1st ed. 1st Impression 1990), p. 168.

Copyright © 2012 by Martin M. van Brauman

The unique nature of Jewish history cannot be understood without recognizing the hand of God directing it. Hatred of the Jews cannot be explained rationally, for any nation which tries to annihilate the Jewish people assumes the role of Amalek. The Word of God was given to Moses and the Jewish people at Mount Sinai and the Jewish nationhood was created along with the hatred against the eternal people. Sinai is derived from the word seen’ah (שינאה) meaning hatred, for the hatred of the world descended upon Israel for bringing God’s Word into the world.

Israel shall always survive the hand of Esau, for [i]f Esau comes to the one camp and strikes it down, then the remaining camp shall survive. Genesis 32:8. For I, your Lord, have not changed; and you, the sons of Jacob, you have not perished. Malachi 3:6. The Word of God given at Sinai, the Torah, is the portable homeland of the Jewish people and because of the eternal covenant between the people and the “homeland,” both shall survive exile and persecution.

Around 1895, Theodor Herzl expressed his belief in the Jews’ divine mission by writing “[f]or God would not have kept us alive so long if there were not left for us a role to play in this history of mankind.”1 Reverend William H. Hechler, chaplain to the British Embassy in Vienna, who had been a Protestant missionary in South Africa, wrote in 1883 The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine According to the Prophets.2 Upon reading Herzl’s The Jewish State, Hechler informed the British Ambassador that Biblical prophecy was about to be fulfilled and Palestine would be restored to the Jews.3

In 1902, Herzl published his novel, Altneuland (Old-New Land) about a Utopian Jewish State in Palestine with the frontispiece having his famous motto “[i]f you will it, it is no dream.”4 The novel was published in Hebrew under the title Tel Aviv (Hill of Spring) and seven years later the town of Tel Aviv was laid out in the sands dunes north of Jaffa.5

When Dr. Chaim Weizmann heard in 1948 that the U.S. State Department was recommending the rejection of any partition of Palestine for a Jewish state and instead a UN trusteeship to President Truman, Weizmann wrote a private letter to the President saying:

The choice of our people, Mr. President, is between statehood and extermination. Providence has placed this issue in your hands, and I am confident that you will yet decide it in the spirit of the moral law.6

The choice today is still the statehood of Israel or extermination. The mainline churches lead the fight to erase statehood for Israel by its anti-Israel divestment at their conventions, at their persistence to demonize Israel and to hype glowing praise on the myth of a pro-Palestinian Liberation Theology.

The mainline churches still preach a general replacement theology, superseding Israel and the Jewish people, and the Lord says to them:

Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say? . . . the one who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. The moment the torrent struck that house, it collapsed and its destruction was complete. Luke 6:46-49.

1 Robert St. John, They Came From Everywhere: Twelve who helped mold modern Israel, (1st ed. 1962), p. 26.

2 Ibid., p. 34.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid., p. 57.

5 Ibid., p. 59.

6 Ibid., p. 158.

Copyright © 2012 by Martin M. van Brauman

Copyright © 2012 by Martin M. van Brauman

. . the wicked walk on every side, when baseness is exalted among the sons of men. Psalms 12:9. 

In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi wrote “the further events fade into the past, the more the construction of convenient truth grows and is perfected.”1 The so-called “occupation” of Judea, Samaria and part of Jerusalem by the Jewish people represents an Orwellian falsification of memory and reality perpetrated by the Arab world, mainline religions and western appeasing governments to the Muslim threat. As quoted by Levi, “human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.”2 The international community, including the US State Department, has considered Israel an “occupier” based upon the premise that it captured this land from Jordan after the Six-Day War in 1967.

A panel headed by former Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy, former Foreign Minister legal adviser Alan Baker and former deputy president of the Tel Aviv District Court Tehiya Shapira recently produced the Levi Report setting out the truth that the Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria, the Golan Heights and the Eastern part of Jerusalem are not illegal “occupations” prohibited by international law.

The Israel haters, who promote the false Palestinian narrative of illegal occupation and whose goal is to delegitimize the Jewish State, are incensed over the Levi Report. If those enlightened intellectuals were actually interested in promoting peace and human rights, they would focus on real atrocities in Syria, Gaza, Iran and most of the Muslim countries that persecute Christians and other minority groups and deny rights to women.

However, the inconvenient truth is that Jordan’s presumed sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and part of Jerusalem was never legally recognized by the international community as Jordan’s action was of conquest during the 1948 War for Independence. The British Mandate never recognized Jordan’s right to occupy the land west of the Jordan River. Jordan was the illegal occupying aggressor, whose army invaded the British Mandate of Palestine following the creation of the Jewish State.

The British Mandate was responsible for the creation of “a national home for the Jewish people” in the land west of the Jordan River with Trans-Jordan created east of the Jordan River for the Arabs. The 1947 UN Partition Plan for Palestine never replaced the British Mandate and the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee and the Arab 2

League refused to recognize the UN Partition Plan and Israel’s right to exist and invaded with the intent of driving the Jews into the sea.

Although the principles of England’s Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, the League of Nations Mandate to Britain to oversee the Jewish national home was finalized at the Allied conference in San Remo, Italy.3 The Balfour Declaration was adopted by the San Remo Conference as a “declaration of sympathy for Jewish Zionist aspirations” and Great Britain was granted a Mandate over Palestine, which was confirmed and defined by the League of Nations.4

The San Remo Conference on April 25, 1920 incorporated the Balfour Declaration into the peace treaty with Turkey (the former Ottoman Empire) at Sèvres and to grant the Palestine mandate to Britain.5 Article 2 of the San Remo resolution, which was ratified by the League of Nations on July 24, 1922, provided the international legal support for the British promise to create a Jewish homeland.6 The League of Nations approved three mandates carved out of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine and Mesopotamia as British mandates and Syria as a French mandate, and approved Arabia as independent under pro-British monarchs.7

Although the U.N. Partition Plan was adopted by the General Assembly on November 29, 1947, it was never accepted by the Arabs, who violently opposed it and appealed to Arabs to flee the British Mandate of Palestine before the coming invasion of the Arab armies.8 The Partition Resolution gave the Arabs 82.5 percent of the Mandate, in addition to their vast holdings all over the Middle East.9

On May 15, 1948, Israel was simultaneously invaded by armies from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, which were launched by the Arabs in rejection to the UN decision for partition. After more than 5 months of fighting the Palestine irregulars (the Arab Liberation Army) of 2,500 before the Declaration of the Jewish state, the Jewish force was met with 6 professional armies of overwhelming superiority in weapons, artillery and air power, consisting of an Egyptian army of 10,000 plus 2,500 of the Moslem Brotherhood, the Transjordan Arab Legion of 4,500 plus 1,500 of the Frontier Corps, a Syrian army of 5,500, an Iraqi army of 4,000, a Lebanese army of 1,500 and a Saudi Arabian army of around 300.10

Trained and led by 40 British officers and armed with British equipment, the Arab Legion opened artillery fire on the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and several hundred Jews were killed when the Jewish Quarter was overrun.11 During the low point of the invasion, Jerusalem was cut off and the Transjordanian army was within 15 miles of Tel Aviv.12 The Arabs’ purpose was the extermination of the Jewish people and this Arab invasion was considered the last campaign of Hitler’s “Final Solution” of World War II.133

With Jordanian control over the Old City and eastern Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967, Jordan destroyed 55 synagogues and reduced the Western Wall area to a slum.14 Jerusalem was divided by barbed wire, minefields and concrete walls with innocent Jewish civilians subject to sporadic shooting by Arabs from the Jordanian sector.15

Between 1948 and 1967, Jordan violated Article Eight of the armistice agreement in denying access to the Jewish holy sites and cultural institutions under its control.16 All Jews in the world were barred from the Western Wall, the Mount of Olives Cemetery, Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron by the Jordanian government in violation of the armistice agreement.17

In spring of 1967, Syria was trying to divert half of the water of the Jordan River from Israel, while shelling Jewish villages in the Hula Valley from the Golan Heights, and President Nasser was moving the Egyptian army and air force into the Sinai, while ousting the U.N peacekeepers and blockading Israel’s Red Sea port Eilat.18 President Nasser signed a war pack with King Hussein, placing the Jordanian Army under Egyptian control, and the other Arab states joined the alliance to totally annihilate the Jewish state.19

On June 4, 1967, the Arab leaders were predicting Israel’s destruction and promising their subjects the spoils of Jewish property to undo the defeat in 1948.20 On June 5th, Nasser prophesied that “the battle will be total and our basic aim will be the destruction of Israel.”21 The Six-Day War of 1967 was the second Arab attempt to destroy Israel with Egypt, Syria and Jordan leading the attack.

When, in May and June 1967, it appeared that another Holocaust loomed, Christian men of God remained silent. Pope Paul VI remained silent.22 The National Council of Churches of the United States remained silent as Nasser rallied the Arab world to destroy Israel, but upon Israel’s survival the mainline Christian world found its voice and condemned Israel’s territorial expansion in unison with Arab propaganda.23 Both the National Council and the World Council of Churches have denounced Israel’s response to terrorism as only acts to further territorial gain and Israel’s alleged “occupation” is to blame for everything.24

The Christian churches were guilty again of silence against a genocidal threat against the Jewish people.25 According to Elie Wiesel, the Jew is not supposed to overcome death for the world “love[s] the Jew only on the cross; if he is not there yet, well, they can oblige.”26 From the period prior to and during the Six-Day War, there was a deafening silence of the Christian churches when Israel faced extinction by the Arab nations.27 However, when the promised Holocaust did not take place during the Six-Day War, the world begrudged Israel its victory.284

1 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, (1st ed. 1988), p. 27.

2 Ibid., 23.

3 Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine. (2nd ed. 1999), p. 76.

4 Abraham J. Heschel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity, (1st ed. 3rd printing 1969), p. 82.

5 Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine, (1st English ed. 2010), p. 5.

6 Ibid. 

7 Michael Makovsky, Churchill’s Promised Land, Zionism and Statecraft, (1st ed. 2007), pp. 77-78.

8 Maurice Roumani, The Case of the Jews From Arab Countries: A Neglected Issue, (1st ed. 4th printing 1983), p. 44.

9 Ibid. 

10 Edward O. Berkman, Cast a Giant Shadow: The Story of Mickey Marcus Who Died to Save Jerusalem, (1st ed. 1962), pp. 212-213.

11 Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, A Lifelong Friendship, (1st ed. 2007), p. 268.

12 Martin van Creveld, The Land of Blood and Honey: The Rise of Modern Israel, (1st ed. 2010), p. 66.

13 Liza M. Wiemer and Benay Katz, Waiting For Peace: How Israelis Live With Terrorism, (1st ed. 2005), p. 42.

14 James Rudin, Christians & Jews Faith to Faith: Tragic History, Promising Present, Fragile Future, (1st ed. 2011), p. 144.

The world is stunned. The eternal victims of history, the Jews, have risen in a single generation from the ashes of the Holocaust to win, in six swift days of June 1967, the greatest military victory since the Second World War. 

In the West the media stammer astonished admiration. In Communist and Arab countries they rage against aggressive Israel and claim that American carrier planes took part in the air strikes. In the United Nations the Soviet Union leads a bitter fight to reverse the victory politically and force the Israelis back behind the old armistice lines of 1949. But various withdrawal proposals worked up by the Russians and the Americans are rejected one after another by the Arab governments, who in August have met in the capital of the Sudan and issued the Khartoum Declaration, embodying irrevocable NO’s – NO negotiation with Israel, NO recognition of Israel, NO peace with Israel.29 

Israel’s triumphant against four armies and some twenty nations did not conform to the image and destiny that the world desires of it, in which Israel is defeated, on its knees and humiliated.30 As Wiesel said the world was incensed because “[t]he lamb dares refuse the sacrifice,”31 the eternal Isaac did not mount the altar.

With respect to the Holocaust, Primo Levi has stated that “[i]t happened, therefore it can happen again.”32 Levi wrote to beware of the “beautiful words” of the Israel haters:

In the Third World it is endemic or epidemic. It only awaits its new buffoon (there is no dearth of candidates) to organize it, legalize it, declare it necessary and mandatory, and so contaminate the world. Few countries can be considered immune to a future tide of violence generated by intolerance, lust for power, economic difficulties, religious or political fanaticism, and racialist attritions. It is therefore necessary to sharpen our senses, distrust the prophets, the enchanters, those who speak and write “beautiful words” unsupported by intelligent reasons. 33 5

15 Ibid. 

16 Ibid., p. 145.

17 Ibid. 

18 Yehuda Avner, The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership, (1st ed. 2010), pp. 132, 135.

19 Ibid. 

20 Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed, (1st ed. 2010), p. 245.

21 Ibid., p. 246.

22 John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum, Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications, (1st ed. 1989), p. 335.

23 Paul C. Merkley, Those That Bless You, I Will Bless: Christian Zionism in Historical Perspective, (1st ed. 2011), p. 185.

24 Ibid., pp. 185-186.

25 Harry James Cargas, When God and Man Failed: Non-Jewish Views of the Holocaust, (1st ed. 1981), p. 106.

26 Elie Wiesel, One Generation After, (1st English translation ed. 1970), p. 132.

27 Irving Greenberg, For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter Between Judaism and Christianity, (1st ed. 2004), p. 36.

28 Wiesel, One Generation After, p. 132.

29 Herman Wouk, The Glory, (1st ed. 1994), p. 3 (Prologue).

30 Wiesel, One Generation After, p. 132.

31 Ibid. 

32 Levi, p. 199

33 Ibid., pp. 199-200.

By: Martin M. van Brauman 

Once again the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA) denominations seriously considered anti-Israel divestment at their conventions this year. They persist to demonize Israel and to hype glowing praise on the myth of a pro-Palestinian Liberation Theology. The mainline churches still preach a general replacement theology that is based upon the Christian church replacing the nation of Israel as God’s people on earth, inheriting all the promised blessings under the Covenant of Abraham. Replacement or supersessionist theology calls Christians the “true Jews” and the church the “new Israel.” Replacement theology is the greatest lie ever told and the very existence of Israel and the survival of the Jewish people represent a repudiation of replacement theology and all of its variations that is the foundation of mainline Christian church dogma.

During the close of the 19th century, Theodor Herzl realized that in general society there was always an invisible yet tangible wall of anti-Semitism surrounding the Jew. Following the Alfred Dreyfus case in Paris, Herzl in 1896 published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), creating the framework for political Zionism with Jewish statehood in an independent territory as the only solution to anti-Semitism. In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer on the French general staff, was falsely accused of selling military secrets to Germany.1 Forged evidence and anti-Semitic propaganda resulted in his court-martial and sentence to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island off French Guyana.2

Herzl thought that the Jewish question was not a social or religious question but a national question that could be solved only by making it “a political world question to be discussed and settled by the civilized nations of the world in council.”3 Herzl thought that “once settled in their own State, would probably have no more enemies.”4

The rebirth of Israel represents a revelatory event in Judaism’s history and Christian dogma must be reborn to accept God’s continuing covenant with the Jewish people for the ancient Covenant is eternal and was never replaced by the Christian church.5 The Jewish question always has been a religious question. The Jewish question is the eternal annoyance that arose with the questions asked of God to Adam of where are you and your soul and to Cain where is your brother and what have you done.6

I will return the captivity of My people Israel, and they will rebuild desolate cities and settle them; they will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will cultivate gardens and eat their fruits. I will plant them upon their land and they will never again be uprooted from their land that I have given them, Said the Lord, your God. Amos 9:14-15.

1. Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion From the Bible to the Big Screen, (1st ed. 2007), p. 137.
2. Ibid. 
3. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, (Dover edition 1988), p. 76.
4. Ibid., p. 153.
5. John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum, Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications, (1st ed. 1989), p. 326.
6. Alan L. Berger and David Patterson, Jewish-Christian Dialogue: Drawing Honey from the Rock, (1st ed. 2008), p. 120.